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"The Mekons are a British rock band. They are one of the longest-running and most prolific of the first-wave British punk rock bands (rivaled in both categories only by The Fall). The band was formed in 1977 by a group of Leeds University art students that included Jon Langford, Kevin Lycett and Tom Greenhalgh - the Gang of Four and Delta 5 formed from the same group of students. They took the band's name from the Mekon, an evil, super-intelligent Venusian featured in the British 1950s-1960s comic Dan Dare (printed in the Eagle). The band's first single was 'Never Been in a Riot,' a satirical take on the Clash's 'White Riot', and for several years the loose-knit band played noisy, bare-bones post-punk, releasing singles on a variety of labels. The Mekons' first album, The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen, was recorded using the Gang of Four's instruments, and due to an error by the Virgin Records art department, featured pictures of the Gang of Four on the back cover. After 1982's The Mekons Story, a compilation of old recordings, the band ceased activity for a while, with Langford forming The Three Johns.

By the mid-80s (revitalised by the 1984 miners' strike and augmented by vocalist Sally Timms, violinist Susie Honeyman, ex-Damned member Lu Edmonds, accordionist/vocalist Rico 'Chickenlegs' Bell, and former Graham Parker and the Rumour drummer Steve Goulding, among others) the Mekons had returned as an active group, and began to experiment with musical styles derived from traditional English folk (tentatively explored on the English Dancing Master EP prior to the hiatus), and American country music. 1985's watershed Fear and Whiskey, 1986's The Edge of the World and 1987's Honky Tonkin exemplified the band's new sound, which built on the innovations of Gram Parsons and blended punk ethos and leftwing politics with the minimalist country of Hank Williams. This style, sometimes referred to as 'post-modern country,' is a direct forerunner of the alt-country genre represented by bands like Uncle Tupelo.

Subsequent albums such as The Mekons Rock'n'Roll, while containing several straightforward rock songs, continued to explore the boundaries of the punk genre by utilizing diverse instrumentation (notably the fiddle and slide guitar) and Timms' haunting vocals."

[reproduced or excerpted from the Wikipedia article "The Mekons" and its use is thus licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License]